1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for loading and unloading sleeves for an Integrated Circuit, or IC, tester wherein electronic components such as IC chips contained in the sleeves are automatically and continuously fed from a supply source to the tester, sorted according to characteristics of the tested chips, and thereafter contained again in empty sleeves.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a prior apparatus for loading and unloading sleeves for an IC tester, the sleeves containing IC chips are manually placed by an operator sequentially and with proper orientation into a pair of loaders each having a hollow channel or "U" shaped cross section. Then the sleeves are transported one by one to the tester to feed the IC chips in the transported sleeve into the tester. The now empty sleeves are randomly collected into a storage box. Thereafter, these empty sleeves are gathered by an operator, fed manually to an unloader, and the IC chips which have passed through the tester and been sorted according to the characteristics of the chips are inserted into the empty sleeves. In this case, the sleeves must be constantly and orderly fed to the loader and unloader manually by the operator. Therefore, in such a prior apparatus, the process is less efficient because feeding the sleeves to the loader is carried out by hand. In addition, because the empty sleeves must be transported by the operator from the loader to the unloader, rather than be automatically transported, productivity is low.